GitHub Codespaces
Late last week, I was accepted into the GitHub Codespaces beta program, and since I've been looking for something to do coding on my iPadPro, and was doing a little work with GitPod, it was something I was really interested in seeing and comparing with GitPod. So I started with two of the projects I've put into GitPod: Advent of Code, and CQ.
First things, Codespaces is a similar in that it's all about Docker images of the repos with enough of a system wrapped around it to enable the style of development needed. Java, Ruby, Node, Rust - if you can do it on Debian or Ubuntu, then you can do it in Codespaces. It's just that universal.
It's also possible to run other images, like Postgres, Mongo, MySQL, and then have them linked up to the repo's instance so that you can refer to the databases off of localhost and the default port. That's really nice.
It's not particularly easy - unless you really understand Dockerfiles... but if you keep at it, they have examples, and for the most part, you'll be able to get something going, and it's all in the repo, so it's simple enough to drop the image, and create another. It just takes time.
What I did find interesting is that the default user for Codespaces is root. I was not at all interested in working as root - even on a Docker image... it's just too uncomfortable. Thankfully, there is a vscode user you can use, and the USER directive in the Dockerfile will drop you into that user when things get started.
The next thing is the permissions... it's wild... everything is open to the world, and again, while this may be "fine" - it's very uncomfortable for me, so I converted the ownership of the workspace to the vscode user, and then removed the additional ACL security with:
$ cd /home/vscode $ sudo chown -R vscode:vscode workspace $ sudo chmod -R g-w workspace $ sudo chmod -R o-w workspace $ sudo setfacl -R -bn workspace
With these done, the directory is owned by vscode and it's respecting the normal umask values on the creation of new files.
In the future, I'm going to have to figure out how to personalize the codespace by using the dotfiles repo in GitHub, and then installing my dot files and updating all these permissions, etc. as well. If I get to have several of these, it'll pay off to have it all done properly from the start...